Foreign Oil Companies Operating In Venezuela To Pay Up

The AP says that most foreign oil companies operating in Venezuela will pay the "back taxes" demanded by Hugo Chavez, about $2 billion for the last ten years. The tax rate is 50%. In addition,

Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez has previously said firms that run the agreements owe some $3 billion in back taxes, and that firms with heavy crude upgrading projects in the Orinoco tar belt owe more than $1 billion in unpaid royalties.

Here'a a link to my longer Venezuela post.

The Downside Of Biodiesel

A Winsted, Conn. man believes a bear tipped over his car and chewed on the fuel tank and fuel lines because the bear smelled the oil inside.

"I knew what it was after," Joy told The Sunday Republican of Waterbury. "I think it's cool that bears do whatever they want."

Joy uses a combination of diesel and vegetable oil left over from restaurant fry vats to power his car. He says it gets 44 miles per gallon.

The car needs to be started using regular diesel because vegetable oil is too thick for the engine to handle. When a gauge indicates the engine coolant is at 90 degrees, it is warm enough to thin the biodiesel and Joy can flip a switch to change fuel tanks.

When the coolant hits about 150 degrees, Joy said there is a sweet smell.

"My neighbor said it smells like cheeseburgers," he said.

Who's The Bigger Fool?

Peak Energy decries Wired as "technofabulists" for their recent article on OTEC technology after the Engineer-Poet threw some, um, cold water on the feasibility of such a system. Well, just so, but I would remind the author of that piece that Wired serves here as a mere messenger; after all, they only paid the journalist who wrote about it. The federal government has spent millions more than that, and for a lot longer. If Wired's editorial staff are a bunch of patsies, what does that make the various departments that cut Craven check after check for literally years? This, kids, is why I'm all hot for using markets to solve the energy problems we're about to face: governments will tend to throw money at those guys who can write good grant proposals or are politically well-connected; actual performance is not required. People whose own capital is on the line will tend to demand results.

C'est Non

Update 5/30: more on this from Reason: "I am very surprised because normally French are cowards".

Update 2: ... and here.

Michael Lynch: The Last Skeptic?

Call me skeptical about his skepticism: via peakoil.com, Michael Lynch gets a piece into the Canadian Globe and Mail decrying the current round of peak oil predictions as "unscientific", noting the Hubbert misread economically-motivated gas production declines as having a geologic origin.

More recent work has falsely assumed that low discoveries in the Middle East mean a lack of oil in the ground, rather than a lack of drilling activity, which is primarily the result of a large glut of discovered oil fields.

Some of these “scientific” analysts graph production and assume a bell curve, seeing an unending decline after any peak, when in fact, countries often peak, decline, then improve their fiscal regime to attract new investment and raise their production again.

Others fit a curve to discoveries by size, and extrapolate it to an asymptote, mistakenly thinking that discovery size could be gleaned from estimates by geologists, and that sequenced oil discoveries reflect geology, rather than being influenced by political decisions as to where and when drilling will be permitted.

Though both these approaches often yield what appear to be solid “fits,” they are descriptive rather than predictive. Oil discoveries are much more human-influenced than the orbits of the planets, which can be predicted by simple observation, and efforts to forecast them are doomed to failure as was curve-fitting of the stock market.

Lynch's Energy SEER website has a number of interesting papers on it, including this one about natural gas (PDF) in which he notes that production declines in US natural gas will require LNG imports (amounting to 5.5 Bcfd by his calculations). It becomes apparent that this Globe And Mail article is really a condensed version of the white paper "The New Pessimism about Petroleum Resources: Debunking the Hubbert Model (and Hubbert Modelers)" (PDF). The one thing I've always found the most interesting in this fairly lengthy paper is the paragraph that

... those who have had access to the IHS Energy database dispute the findings of Campbell and Laherrere, including the geologists of the USGS, who relied on the database in concluding that reserve growth is not only real but substantial (600 billion barrels; see USGS 2000). Perhaps more damning, personnel at IHS Energy themselves estimate global reserve growth at 373 billion barrels and total URR at over 3000 billion barrels. Where Campbell and Laherrere foresee remaining recoverable resources of conventional petroleum limited to 1100 billion barrels, IHS estimates it at over 2200 billion, a huge difference. (Stark 2002) Perhaps the creators of the database understand it less perfectly than Campbell and Laherrere, but that is hard to accept without further evidence. [emphasis mine]

(p. 5; note I'm using the PDF pages, as his document is unnumbered.) Lynch then attacks Laherriere and Campbell's construction of creaming curves by field size rather than date of discovery as a method whose "utility (and novelty) ... is hard to comprehend" (p 8). Again, as with the case of natural gas, he ascribes the lack of oil discoveries in the Middle East to the decade of cheap oil in the 1990's: "To an economist, the drop in exploration reflects optimal behavior: they do not waste money exploring for something they will not use for decades" (p 8).

It would be comforting if Lynch were right, and while that is possible, the greater possibility is that he is not. Whether it's ExxonMobil tacitly admitting a peak in oil production within five years in its report, "The Outlook for Energy The Outlook for Energy A 2030 View", or outsiders like John S. Herold, Inc. using SEC documents to do the projections, the worriers would seem to outnumber the optimists.

Saudi Arabia's King Fahd Hospitalized, Dead?

Saudi Arabia's King Fahd was hospitalized with pneumonia today. Conflicting reports say the country is either in a state of alert or not, depending. Fahd's brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, has been the country's de facto ruler since 1995, when Fahd had a severe stroke.

A UPI report claims he is dead.

Update 5/28: Reuters and numerous other sources indicate Fahd is alive and stable, though skepticism persists in the desert kingdom:

Despite palace assurances, King Fahd's health was of great concern to many Saudis in a country where information is often filtered and rumours fly. Some believed the monarch was in a coma. Others took the prayer request as an ominous sign.

"I think the fact the government so quickly told us about the king's condition means things are very serious this time," said Abu Fahad, a 24-year-old university student.

Businessman Mohammed Sulaiman said: "I actually think he is already dead and that the authorities are holding out on telling people so that the news doesn't come as too much of a shock."

Saudi security sources said princes had started arriving in the Saudi capital, a sign of concern for the king's health.

Also, check out the lengthy comment left behind by Robert Schwartz:

Here is the important fact. There is no theory of legitimate inheritance of a kindom in Islam. ... When Fahd dies, Abd'allah will continue to rule the kindom, but his sucession [sic] will not be assured. He will be challenged by many others. ... Indeed, it is possible that the civil war has already begun.

France All But Concedes Non Vote On EU Constitution

The official line is that it's up to the voters, not the exit polls, but according to The Times of London, the EU Constitution is "lost":

“The thing is lost,” Nicolas Sarkozy told French ministers during an ill-tempered meeting. “It will be a little ‘no’ or a big ‘no’,” he was quoted as telling Jean-Pierre Raffarin, the Prime Minister, whom he accused of leading a feeble campaign.

Although Europe would be thrown into disarray, the Government would be greatly relieved if M Sarkozy were right.

Ministers have privately told The Times that Britain is prepared to ditch its commitment to a referendum if France, or the Netherlands next Wednesday, vote against the constitution. They believe that if the French say “no”, President Chirac will have to declare the constitution dead or promise a renegotiation.

This has some rather important ramifications for Middle Eastern politics; for one thing, minus a united political front, the nuclear talks with Iran start to look a little weak. With the EU at an impasse, it also strengthens Russia's hand in Europe -- and elsewhere. For my part, I've always suspected the EU was an attempt by France to eat lunch and have Germany pay for it (i.e., they wanted the benefits of a strong currency without the fiscal discipline). Too, there have been those suggesting (something I recall reading in the Economist some time ago?) that immigration would be a silent factor in EU unification; France might publicly wish for unification, but if it means including Turkey, the deal's off, but they can't come out and say as much.

If the EU ultimately flops -- and without France aboard, it's hard to see how it could succeed -- how this will affect monetary union? Will the individual countries revert to their old currencies? Will the bureaucratic ediface of the EU also be reabsorbed by the various member states? Some very interesting questions now arise.

Update: More from the Times:

French diplomats say that M Chirac is expected to urge other countries to proceed with ratification because France does not want to be seen to be blocking the European project. Any attempt to persuade other countries to go ahead will dash the hopes of those in the British Government who believed that a French rejection would make a British referendum unnecessary.

British ministers argue that it will be impossible to hold a referendum next year because the final shape of the treaty on which the British would be voting will be unknown.

Why should they worry about something as trivial as what the law says? American legislators vote in favor of things they've never even read!

US ITER Funding In Doubt

Just as the ITER siting impasse appeard to be broken, comes news from New Scientist that the Congressional support for ITER has suddenly started to waffle.

The US is expected to cover 10% of ITER's cost - a portion estimated at $1.12 billion - spread between now and 2013. The Bush administration requested an increased sum of $49.5 million to become available in 2006, to fund ITER through the US Department of Energy (DOE).

But the appropriations committee in the House - which can suggest changes to the budget in bills that then go to the Senate for debate - objected to the source of the funding. It said two-thirds of the increase for ITER would come as a result of cuts in other US fusion research, against the committee's previous requests. Under the cuts, three major fusion research facilities could operate for a total of only 17 weeks in 2006 instead of the planned 48, it said.

Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert has recommended a provision in the budget that no money will be committed to ITER until somebody can figure out where it's supposed to come from. David Goldston, chief of staff of the House Science Committee, says

We think, like the Department of Energy, that you can't keep the fusion programme exactly as it is and also do ITER. There's no way to do ITER as an add-on.

"Goldston says that unless a compromise is made, 'US participation in ITER is unlikely'."

The Endless Energy Well In The Deep Sea

Overview of the Craven process

Via Wired, a pretty interesting story about one Dr. John Piña Craven, the "brilliant psychotic" behind the Navy's Polaris program, and now with an equally half-crank, half-why-didn't-I-think-of-that solution to the world's energy problems: placing pipes to the ocean deeps to harvest the temperature differential between the upper (warm) layers of the oceans and the lower (near freezing) depths.

Craven's system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet - perpetually just above freezing - and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona. Under Craven, the lab developed the process of using cold deep-ocean water and hot surface water to produce electricity. By the 1980s the Natural Energy Lab's demonstration plant was generating net power, the world's first through so-called ocean thermal energy conversion.

"The potential of OTEC is great," says Joseph Huang, a senior scientist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and an expert on the process. "The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there's enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world's needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap."

The US Navy has signed a deal to put an OTEC power plant on the tiny island speck of Diego Garcia, a naval base some hundreds of miles south of India; as well, they have a project in the works to build an OTEC plant on Saipan.

Here's how Craven plans to generate power from the cold water:

Pipes draw warm water from the ocean surface and cold water from the seabed. The warm water enters a vacuum chamber and is evaporated into steam that drives an electricity-producing turbine. The cold water condenses the steam back into water for drinking and irrigation.

Aside from power generation, the cold water can be used to generate freshwater (through sweating), force plants into producing more fruit than they would otherwise (he claims "he can get three crops of grapes a year and pineapples in eight months instead of the usual 18"), and provide immensely cheaper air conditioning. According to testimony (PDF) before the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, using deep ocean water for refrigeration reduces costs by 90%. In that same document, he presages the Engineer-Poet's call to bury nuclear power generators -- only Craven suggests they be sunk deep in the ocean. Drawing on his experience with nuclear submarine design, he writes

There is a supplementary energy resource that has already been developed and deployed for almost fifty years. It is the pressurized water nuclear reactor as employed and deployed in American military submarines. These reactors are fail safe. Unlike many land based versions of nuclear power they will not go critical if they lose their water or if they are destroyed by accident or act of terrorism. Thirteen feet of water is as effective a shield as one foot of lead. If by war or accident or terrorist sabotage they are crushed in ocean depths their tomb is shielded from the atmosphere in a way that no land based or space based reactor can match.

Fascinating, mad-scientist stuff.

Update 5/27: here's a link to the Common Heritage Corporation. Further information on OTEC technology can be found at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which in fact no longer performs research in this area. One reason to be somewhat skeptical about the outcome of OTEC anywhere but the Hawaiian Islands is made readily apparent by this map:

The problem for most of the developed world is that it is either too shallow in the oceans near the coasts, and/or the temperature gradients are too low.

Good Stuff From Winds of Change On China And Bolivia

Two from Winds of Change today, the first being a story about the illusion of "managing" Chinese ambitions. The WoC story links to a Robert Kagan post that questions the historical success of "managing" a rising power, an activity that "provides little reason for confidence or comfort". Kagan also writes

The security structures of East Asia, the Western liberal values that so dominate our thinking, the "liberal world order" we favor -- this is the "international system" into which we would "integrate" China. But isn't it possible that China does not want to be integrated into a political and security system that it had no part in shaping and that conforms neither to its ambitions nor to its own autocratic and hierarchical principles of rule? Might not China, like all rising powers of the past, including the United States, want to reshape the international system to suit its own purposes, commensurate with its new power, and to make the world safe for its autocracy? Yes, the Chinese want the prosperity that comes from integration in the global economy, but might they believe, as the Japanese did a century ago, that the purpose of getting rich is not to join the international system but to change it?

Absolutely, and the answer to these questions is a nearly-certain "yes". Second, they link to a story by Dr. Jack Wheeler. Doc Wheeler is possessed of some, um, rather nutty ideas -- "Russia is doomed as a culture due to its inheritance of Mongol concepts of justice and equality". (We'll get back to you on that one, Jack.) But back to the story. WoC's story focuses on the notion that Bolivia is about to fission because its current el presidente, Carlos Mesa, is "teetering" thanks to political unrest partly fueled by the 50 trillion cubic foot natural gas reserves in the east, known as the Media Luna or Half Moon. The Cruceños -- named after Santa Cruz, in the center of natural gas production and the bulk of the country's economic output -- who live there apparently despise Mesa and have managed to get a referendum about autonomy on the ballot. Everyone else, especially those living in the poor western altiplano, wants to nationalize the gas resources. Naturally, this activity is being funded by Hugo Chavez.

Chile, Argentina, and Brazil all have a big stake in what happens -- they get virtually all of their natural gas from Bolivia -- and the U.S. has dispatched Donald Rumsfeld to Argentina lately to get a handle on how best to isolate the problem. If Cruceño turf goes indy, the theory goes, eventually it will merge with Argentina and Brazil, leaving the rest of the country in the cold, probably to join up with Chile. Hugo Chavez might want to stop all of this, but it's hard to see how; the Bolivian officer corps consists primarily of Cruceños.

Serendipity: Introducing USC's Peter Gordon

Chiasm recently wrote about the importance of filters in a market of extreme diversity. Linking to Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice, which notes the existence of such a thing as "choice fatigue", he maybe misses what he aimed at with the reference to Devo. I suspect Schwartz was actually referring to Devo's song, "Freedom of Choice":

Freedom of choice
Is what you got
Freedom from choice
Is what you want

What we don't care about in the age of Google is the tenth page of search results; what we do care about is the first three, and maybe even the first page above the digital "fold".

All this got me thinking about my bête noir, and thence to Google, whereupon I found the following aged CNN article. Included is an extended quote from USC's Peter Gordon regarding the New Urbanism:

Peter Gordon, a professor at the University of Southern California's Graduate School of Policy, Planning and Development, rejects [Kunstler's claims]. "This Doomsday stuff is always wrong," he says. "People who are ignorant of the previous track record of Doomsday forecasts blithely go on making them, which is fine. But it's when they prescribe harsh measures for the rest of us to live by that we ought to take serious notice."

Gordon says the New Urbanist model of living has one crucial flaw: People actually like suburbs.

"What I define as a livable city is where real people are choosing to go. That's the only way I can define it," Gordon says. "That may not jibe with the image of what's livable to certain writers, but ... it's the preferences of the people that ought to count in some calculus somewhere."

"The argument that people like driving around in their SUVs and living in pod subdivisions is really beside the point," Kunstler says. "People also like shooting heroin. People also like drinking too much. People like eating more fatty food than is good for them. There are a lot of things that people like that the world does not necessarily reward them for."

Now of course if economic circumstances force people out of such developments, it's another matter, and such an event (see the title of this blog) is not unthinkable. But, in keeping with Odograph's post linking to the Kenneth Deffeyes interview the other day, it's critical to filter out the apocalyptic, just because it tends to be so often wrong. Aside from Gordon's home page (chock-full of interesting-looking reads), he also has a blog. I leave this behind today as much an artifact for me to return to, as to publicize his efforts to whatever small audience I have.

Warren Buffett: "No Limit" To Berkshire Hathaway Energy Buys

The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffet, has purchased energy producer PacifiCorp, and says he plans on acquiring lots more such companies in the future. He further said there is "no limit" to the amount of money he plans on spending in that sector. Berkshire owns MidAmerican, which plans on buying PacifiCorp.

In related news, Standard & Poor's may reclassify MidAmerican's credit rating, raising it from BBB-, one rank above junk status, while PacifiCorp's (at A-, the seventh-highest grade) might be degraded slightly.

Vanadium Redox Energy Storage

Via Utilipoint IssueAlert, a quick mention of this vanadium redox energy storage system that claims to have some remarkable properties, including a claimed 70-78% round-trip efficiency, up to 220 W/kg energy density, and a real-time energy storage ability (i.e., it charges as fast as it discharges). It does require a pump (they estimate it will need replacement every 5-7 years, ouch). All this without using heavy metals. Sweet!

Fitch Downgrades GM Bonds To Junk Status

Just a brief mention: Green Car Congress reports Fitch Ratings has downgraded GM bonds to junk. The downgrade has cause commercial holders of such bonds required to carry "investment grade-only" paper to dump them.

``This is the tip of the iceberg with GM,'' said Shelly Lombard, an analyst at New York-based debt research firm Gimme Credit. ``They have issues over the next couple of years and they've not even started addressing their problems yet.''

It may not matter much, though, because the earlier downgrade by Standard & Poor's pretty much had everyone scurrying for the exits already.

Questioning Saudi Crude Calculations

Rigzone says there's skepticism about the actual and reported oil production in Saudi Arabia:

Call it the 4% difference.

That's the gap between what Saudi Arabia says it pumped since March and outside estimates of what the world's biggest and most important oil producer actually did.

Total up what Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi and his aides say the kingdom has produced from February to April and you get 848 million barrels.

But OPEC estimates based on secondary sources put the total at 839 million barrels. And the International Energy Agency pegs it at 814 million barrels - a 34 million barrel difference.

The Saudi figure is based on public statements by Saudi officials that put February output at 9.25 million barrels a day, rising to 9.5 million b/d in March and staying there ever since.

But numerous outside sources say the Saudis haven't hit 9.5 million b/d since at least December, if ever.

As the article goes on to say, the method outsiders use to account for crude is to watch the size and number of tankers leaving Saudi Arabia. It's an inexact science, so some error is inevitable, but the heart of the problem is Saudi credibility. If the error continues to rise, it begins to look like bad faith rather than just inaccuracy.

National Ignition Facility: Not Firing On All Cylinders?

Via Slashdot, a brief word about this AP story on the National Ignition Facility and its critics, who charge that the NIF is a bloated, big science project draining funding from other projects. The NIF is attempting to achieve nuclear fusion by using precision, high-energy lasers aimed at a deuterium-tritium target. Its critics claim the NIF is nothing more than an attempt to refine nuclear weapons technology. The project, as is typical of such large government efforts, has vastly exceeded its initial estimated cost of $677 million (1993 estimate) to $3.5 billion with a 2008 completion date. Pete Dominici (R-NM) sounds a skeptical note:

"We never intended to spend $5 billion to $6 billion to build a laser facility for ... civilian research," Sen. Pete Domenici, R-New Mexico, chairman of the Senate subcommittee that funds the NIF program, lectured an Energy Department scientist last year when he learned fusion ignition experiments might be postponed.

Energy Department officials now say the project remains on schedule with the first fusion ignition tests planned for 2010. Domenici remains skeptical.

"It's a terrible expense and a drain" on other programs to maintain the nuclear arsenal, Domenici said in an interview. "They're going to have to prove they can get the job done."

Fusion ignition is the endgame, and if the LLNL physicists don't achieve it in the next few years, they might find themselves running out of grants, and in a big hurry. Anybody wanna buy a used laser?

Using Sodium Borohydride As Hydrogen Storage

I've tended to shy away from fuel cell stories simply because the the problems inevitably are the same, with different filigrees: promising technology that's either too expensive (i.e., use lots of platinum), can't handle real-world fuels (need H₂ and therefore reformers), or have large hidden technical problems (viz. solid oxide fuel cells) which are not easily solved. So much of the efforts involved in using fuel cells comes from fuel storage, as this longish Technology Review article makes clear. Millennium Cell has a proprietary process using sodium borohydride to story hydrogen in notebook "batteries" featuring a fuel cell that lasts, at present, up to three hours. By using sodium borohydride, they limit the use of platinum in the fuel cell, keeping costs down.

The punchline -- stop me if you've heard this one before -- is that the technical and economic problems will be solved within a couple years.

Jevon's Paradox Infests Oil Consumption Forecasting

A recent Energy Outlook musing about SUVs reminds us that Jevon's Paradox (resource utilization effiency leads, not to lower demand, but higher) is alive and well. In Geoff's scenario, SUVs are being wrongly blamed for the large increase in oil consumption; the real problem is the number of miles driven overall. FuturePundit passes on a piece by Walter's Brain On Sustainable Mobility (whew!) in which he initially indicated that efficiency would result in more miles being driven. The reality, after a few hours of meditation and some corrections, seems to be more along the lines of "less fuel would be consumed, but not as much as the improvement in fuel economy."

Look For the OTC:BB Symbol Of Quality!

Recently, peakoil.com ran a press release from Canadian company Fairchild International Corporation indicating they had found a way to produce "synthetic natural gas" from arbitrary carboniferous fuelstocks, including "low-grade coal, wood waste and other biomass".

Anish Somani, Fairchild President said, "Synthetic natural gas "SynGas" has the potential to replace natural gas in powering our communities, homes and industrial plants in the future. Our technology allows us to produce SynGas cheaper than the current costs of processing gas. Our new approach allows us to take the guess work out of exploration activities in an era when traditional fossil fuels have become expensive and scarce."

Notice the 25:1 reverse split on their home page. Notice the OTC:BB (penny stock, over-the-counter) listing. Notice the 0.43 share price. Notice the absence of information about patents. (Most likely, what they've got is just another fuel gasification system that generates town gas.) Caveat emptor.

Venezuela To Pay Oil Royalties In Local Currency

Hyperinflation alert: In a near-certain sign the government intends to make the bolivar worthless, the Venezuelan government has decided to pay oil firms in the local currency rather than dollars, as was done previously.

Now, companies will have to register with a state-run currency agency, known as Cadivi, to convert local currency into dollars. The central bank pays Cadivi directly for currency transactions.

During the first quarter of 2005, Ramirez said PDVSA paid out US$890 million (euro705.17 million) to companies working under the operating contracts.

Cadivi is notoriously slow in processing dollar requests and demands excessive paperwork, prompting many companies to buy dollars at a more expensive rate on a booming black market. The official exchange rate is 2,150 bolivars per dollar, but one greenback fetches around 2,600 bolivars on the black market.

Update: Two more Venezuela-related items: first, from the Seattle Times, a story about how activist Maria Corina Machado is on trial for treason thanks to a $31,000 grant:

The act of treason Machado allegedly committed? Her human-rights organization accepted $31,000 from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy for voter-education workshops ahead of the divisive August recall referendum.

This in the context of deteriorating relations between Venezuela and the US. Second, this Houston Chronicle piece by Douglas MacKinnon indicating Venezuela and the "mad mullahs" of Iran are having talks about nuclear arms development. I give this kind of talk little credibility as yet, but the possibility remains sensible and so I don't dismiss it entirely.

Methane In Geopressurized Brine

Winds of Change has a monster energy roundup post with links-a-plenty for you ravenous readers, but the one that really caught my eye was the one about geopressurized brine. Unfortunately, the WoC story link was busted, but I found it again at Searching For The Truth. This paragraph explains what they are and how they can be useful:

Geopressured reservoirs or aquifers exist deep underground, usually as a salty solution or brine, in locations throughout the world. The brine is typically saturated with methane, with between 30 to 80 cubic feet of methane gas contained in each barrel of fluid. Fluid pressures in such aquifers can be as much as twice the normal hydrostatic gradient, meaning that significant pressure will exist at the wellhead when the reservoir is tapped. The water is also often quite hot, with temperatures typically within the range of 90 °C - 200 °C. Three types of energy could potentially be derived from geopressurized brine: (1) Thermal energy from the temperature of the fluid; (2) mechanical energy from the fluid pressure; and (3) chemical energy from the methane that is suspended within the fluid.

Researcher Vaclav Smil claims that as much as 110 times the amount of conventional natural gas could exist in geopressurized brine. With higher energy prices (natural gas and oil), market conditions that made extraction of these resources uneconomical in the 1990's now no longer exist, and extraction becomes feasible. A paper by Unocal's Jeremy Griggs (PDF) suggests that with further research, these resources could be successfully harvested.

Do-It-Yourself Slavery

I let this slide, but I probably shouldn't have. A couple weeks back, Geoffrey Styles called an Oregon proposal to install GPS transponders in automobiles and tax the resulting miles driven an "attractive" option to replace the tax dollars lost due to increasing vehicle efficiency. In the comments, I noted my displeasure with such a proposal -- which, combined with the recent and no-debate-allowed passage of the Real ID Act, sets up a system of surveillance the old East German Stasi could only dream of. The abuses of such a scheme are not only endless but cut to the heart of what a representative democracy is supposed to be about: does the state work for the people, or is it the other way around?

Clearly, the Oregonians proposing such a thing have no qualms about their system, but a belief in the state's ability to keep their hands off the data for other purposes is not only naive, but dangerous. We already have double secret no-fly lists, whose victims have included activists, as well as the notable submariner and Senator, Ted Kennedy. Geoff answered back to my objections that

For good or ill, we are embarking on an experiment in a new form of government: a representative democracy with a free press and plaintiff's bar, but in which the forces of law and order have more information about individuals than any police state in history. Our children will live in a very different country than the one in which we grew up.

But that will be true only if we let the government get away with it. The Real ID Act couldn't be passed on its own merits; to get it through, it had to be tacked on to an appropriations bill that had a 100% chance of passing (which indeed it did in the Senate, by a shameful 100-0 vote). There's still hope, though: this measure is expensive, and will require funding, funding which could be diminished or eliminated later on. A good thing, too, for as computer security expert Bruce Schneier recently pointed out, Real ID amounts to "a huge power-grab by the federal government" that in the final analysis is massively counterproductive to the ends it claims to further:

The REAL ID Act requires driver's licenses to include a "common machine-readable technology." This will, of course, make identity theft easier. Assume that this information will be collected by bars and other businesses, and that it will be resold to companies like ChoicePoint and Acxiom. It actually doesn't matter how well the states and federal government protect the data on driver's licenses, as there will be parallel commercial databases with the same information.

Even worse, the same specification for RFID chips embedded in passports includes details about embedding RFID chips in driver's licenses. I expect the federal government will require states to do this, with all of the associated security problems (e.g., surreptitious access).

REAL ID requires that driver's licenses contain actual addresses, and no post office boxes. There are no exceptions made for judges or police -- even undercover police officers. This seems like a major unnecessary security risk.

REAL ID also prohibits states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal aliens. This makes no sense, and will only result in these illegal aliens driving without licenses -- which isn't going to help anyone's security. (This is an interesting insecurity, and is a direct result of trying to take a document that is a specific permission to drive an automobile, and turning it into a general identification device.)

REAL ID is expensive. It's an unfunded mandate: the federal government is forcing the states to spend their own money to comply with the act. I've seen estimates that the cost to the states of complying with REAL ID will be $120 million. That's $120 million that can't be spent on actual security.

And the wackiest thing is that none of this is required. In October 2004, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 was signed into law. That law included stronger security measures for driver's licenses, the security measures recommended by the 9/11 Commission Report. That's already done. It's already law.

Schneier elsewhere rips apart the idea that national ID cards will do anything to help security, and in fact will serve to reduce it. Identification by itself is no security; Schneier rightly asks

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

Ultimately, the real danger with all such schemes is that they rely on the government to remain docile, or at least controllable. The risk really descends to ordinary, law-abiding citizens, who, with GPS-enabled cars and RFID-enabled drivers' licenses, could be tracked by the state at any time. That is to say, if the TSA can hassle and delay a Senator of the United States from getting on an airplane now, how much more dangerous will it be when the database implicit in Real ID incorrectly tags a mere citizen as a security risk?

The men who wrote the Constitution were a suspicious lot; caring not to trust governments, they chained theirs, dividing its authority so that ordinary men could be free, chattel slavery notwithstanding. To permit warrantless intrusions into everyday life is to lay the foundations for a police state. The cliché "if you build it, they will come" has never seemed more appropriate.

This Is My Side Of The Street, Dammit

... he warn't only just a farmer, he was a preacher, too, and had a little one-horse log church down back of the plantation, which he built it himself at his own expense, for a church and schoolhouse, and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too. There was plenty other farmer-preachers like that, and done the same way, down South.

-- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Chap. XXXIII

This is a topic that deserves a more thorough analysis than the brief post and couple links I plan on giving it here, but I find this Biblical peak oil site (thanks to peakoil.com) not a little amusing because of its connection to one of peak oil's bigger showmen, Jim Kunstler. Kunstler has lately found it meet to lift the jargon of the worst elements of evangelical Christianity for his own ends. The irony, of course, is that he professes his hate of the people from whom he steals his similes; his is merely the Green version of rapture theology.

It is a theology without much history, according to a recent Kansas City Star article (registration required, or bugmenot.com). Wilburn T. Stancil, associate professor of theology and religious studies at Rockhurst University, says that rapture theology often stems from the writings of one Cyrus I. Scofield, who published a biblical reference in 1909. Espousing a tenet known as "premillenial dispensationalism", he claimed that at the moment of judgement, true believers would be taken to Jesus before the troubles happen, while nonbelievers would be left behind to, well, deal.

Although Stancil says a belief in a literal 1,000-year reign of Christ on Earth can be found in the writings of some early church fathers, Scofield's ideas are rooted in the thinking of John Nelson Darby, a 19th-century Church of England cleric who founded the Plymouth Brethren. Darby, who spent considerable time in America, may, in turn, have been amplifying the 1830 end-times visions of a 15-year-old girl in Scotland.

Stancil says premillennial dispensationalism has shown great “resiliency and adaptability” in the face of changing world events that premillennialists such as Lindsey interpret in light of their theology. Lindsey's 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, did much to popularize this theology.

Premillennial dispensationalism may seem “rigid and inflexible,” Stancil says, but, in fact, it is “capable of almost endless mutations.” Dispensationalists, he says, insist the Bible must be read literally, “though ironically, it's the symbolic ... interpretation of the Bible that fosters the adaptability” found in Lindsey's view of the end times.

Rapture-based theology is misguided, Rossing says, because “God saves us not by snatching us out of the world, but by coming into the world to be with us.” She calls the rapture “an invented idea.” Theologian and author R.C. Sproul, founder of Ligonier Ministries of Orlando, Fla., holds a similar opinion, calling a rapture of the church at the start of seven years of tribulation “pure fiction” based on “manifestly flawed” theology.

The real world tends to be messier than historical determinists would like; large scale planning is hard enough to do for big companies, let alone entire nations. It's a fact the Soviets came hard against and failed to overcome, acknowledged late in the game by the Soviet planner Nikolai Fedorenko when he said it would take 30,000 years to come up with an adequate one-year plan. That experience doesn't take Kunstler down any notches; he's got a plan for everybody and an apocalyptic vision to herd them where he wants them to go. So his public venom directed at the religious right is better understood when taken in context; he absorbs and regurgitates their liturgy, translating it to a different audience. No wonder, then, that he hates them so: if there's one thing a carnie can't stand, it's another carnie working the same side of the street.

IEEE Spectrum Sonofusion Article

As promised, Rusi Taleyarkhan, Richard Lahey, and Robert Nigmatulin have published an article in the May 2005 issue of IEEE Spectrum. Not much new here, though they do make the interesting claim that their apparatus makes "400 000 neutrons per second" -- a pretty bold claim, considering (a) the Spectrum is not a peer-reviewed journal, and (b) the countercharges of inadequate detection leveled by Seth Putterman. Nonetheless, the trio sounds the right note for a budding group hoping to get angel financing, saying "our experiments to date have shown that with many relatively small steps" the relatively modest (they claim a "negligible fraction of a watt of power") energy produced by their reactor could be scaled to larger devices. They also claim that following an increase of pressure in the vessel holding the deuterated acetone "from 700 kPa to 1500 kPa, we detected an increase in the neutron output by a factor of about 100 000", with "10²² neutrons per second" as the ultimate goal needed for commercial power generation. Also, they look beyond acetone, and have investigated "exotic silicon- and carbon-based liquids that can work at much higher temperatures" than acetone, which they use at 0C.

The group provides as footnotes this PowerPoint presentation, which suggests energies of 200x10⁶ K during sonocavitation are possible, and claims having recorded 10⁸ K.

At this point, I redouble my caveats -- "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" -- and pass on.

The Uncle John's Methane Hydrate Cruise

Just a quick post to provide a link to the DOE's methane hydrate exploration page; so far, no banana, or even methane hydrates.

The State-Run Messes In Venezuela And Mexico

Venezuela

Am I cynical about the South American republics' newfound nationalism when it comes to their oil industries? Of course; no government willingly cedes power, and all of them sense when the other guy is behind the eight ball. But all is not well in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, no sir; Bloomberg News reports that country's oil production falls 200,000 barrels per day below its official OPEC quota, something president Hugo Chavez has denied for some time. As pointed out earlier in this space, Petroleos de Venezuela has had charges of favoritism, corruption, and intimidation leveled at high-ranking executives, all of which likely factor in. A crippling strike in December 2002 and January 2003 "aimed at ousting Chavez" failed, and the company then hired workers loyal to Chavez.

``There's a significant lack of transparency in Petroleos de Venezuela,'' said Jason Todd, an analyst with Fitch Inc., a credit ratings company in New York. He pegs the country's oil output at no higher than 2.5 million barrels. ``We certainly have concerns about Petroleos de Venezuela's production.''

The company has yet to release its 2003 and 2004 annual reports. Several deadlines to deliver the results to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in Washington have been missed. The company is subject to U.S. regulators because its refining unit, Houston-based Citgo Petroleum Corp., issued debt in the U.S.

Blogger News Network has much, much more on this, citing an Agence France-Presse report claiming the drop is as much as 800,000 barrels per day. As well, they mention this AP story indicating that Chavez is getting testy and wants his "back taxes" now, thank you very much, and with the following wrinkle:

According to Venezuelan law, oil companies must pay [a] 30 percent royalty, but companies producing heavy crude - which is expensive to produce - were allowed to pay 1 percent royalty until last year, when the government raised it to 16 percent.

Estimated back taxes amount to $2 billion on companies such as ChevronTexaco, British Petroleum, Total, Petrobras, Repsol YPF, Royal Dutch Shell, and China National Petroleum Corp.

The sudden interest in "back taxes", it turns out, may just be a bold move masking the precarious financial situation of a state-run operation hurtling toward bankruptcy, according to the blogger running Venezuela News And Views. He points to an editorial in the English-language Venezuela Today by Gustavo Coronel, who fires a bitter recrimination against Chavez. Chavez's chief spiritual advisor, Jesuit priest Jesús Gazo, has taken up the klaxon against corruption now rampant in the country, saying "I am convinced that the highest levels of the government are corrupt, including ministers and National Assembly members. If nothing is done this can end the revolution." It is a corruption, we presume, that infects Petroleos de Venezuela. Firing large numbers of maintenance workers (replacing them with only a quarter to a third their former numbers), combined with admitted mismanagement could accelerate the 2005 Q4 supply crunch I mentioned earlier, which itself may possibly manifest Geoff Styles' proposed structural production peak.

No consideration of the situation in Venezuela would be complete without a mention of a wonderful blog I happened on recently, The Devil's Excrement, hosted at Salon.com. In particular, I would like to draw your attention to this great piece noting the lack of progress on the alleged social reforms Hugo Chavez trumpeted when his name was on the ballot, as well as a deeper analysis of production overreporting.

Update: I should also like to add this Stratfor letter republished in the admittedly biased vcrisis.com. Stratfor, known for their extensive high-quality for-fee analysis, make the all-too-credible observation that "many individuals associated with Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution could be stealing", and that Chavez and his pals may have looted Petroleos de Venezuela (or PDVSA as it is commonly abbreviated) to the tune of $2.39 billion dollars over the last year -- "if the government's official production figures are truthful." That might actually be a conservative estimate, as it assumes a $39.33/bbl oil price. Indeed, a descrepancy of $4.02 billion appeared when PDVSA only deposited $4.08 billion instead of the $6.43 billion Energy and Mines Minister Rafael Ramirez should have deposited. Stratfor, for their part, believes production underreporting caused the differnce, or the bulk of it, anyway.

Forecasting "collapsing crude oil production will continue for the foreseeable future", Stratfor also believes that the campaign of intimidation against foreign oil companies is backfiring, as even Brazilians, Spaniards, and Chinese, the designated "special strategic partners of his Bolivarian Revolution" are being hit with "back taxes". A $40 billion expansion plan "only exists on paper", and foreign oil companies report impasse after impasse when trying to negotiate with the government; one company reports that "[n]o one in PDVSA or the Energy Ministry seems to have any negotiating capabilities."

Mexico

Undercapitalization and mismanagement are two features of most government-run oil operations, and it appears Mexico's Pemex is no exception. Reuters today documents Pemex's struggles against the Mexican government's unwillingness to afford foreign investment. With its big field, Cantarell, expected to go into decline within two years, Pemex had better find more oil and gas, and soon, if only for domestic consumption. Trouble is, what's left in the country is technically difficult to get to (e.g., deepwater Gulf of Mexico) and requires tons of cash -- cash that Pemex, a state agency bled as a cash cow, doesn't have. So, Mexico struggles to find a politically acceptable way to enter some kind of joint exploration agreement without having to cede a percentage of the profits. The situation gets so bad that Pemex openly hints that it may go abroad rather than trying to develop domestic reserves.

---

In somewhat related news, Mexico's proximity to the U.S., and, let's face it, laxer safety standards and, um, more pliable government has made it a target for the construction of LNG terminals, presumably to serve U.S. natural gas needs. However, Mexico is having second thoughts about providing LNG terminals that "[leave Mexico] with the disadvantages and none of the advantages".

Ecuador To Follow In Venezuela's Footsteps

Ecuador's Energy Minister Fausto Cordovez will review oil production contracts:

In an interview with the daily Expreso, Energy Minister Fausto Cordovez said if the contracts "are well formulated and within legal and ethical norms ... they will be respected." He added that he was not trying to cause panic, but that "if the multinationals believe that a nationalist minister is going to do them harm, they will have to make a decision. I'm not going to be frightened by the threat of someone leaving."

Oil brought in about $2.13 billion in 2004 to Ecuador. The new government, as with Venezuela, looking to buy votes, and wants to put the squeeze on foreign oil companies.

Green Server Farms

Odograph today passes on a combination server and router that uses a scant 3.1 watts. The topic of server energy use is one that I've been interested in for some time, because my employer uses dozens and dozens of servers at a colocation facility (or colo) in downtown LA. Yesterday Slashdot ran a piece about green buildings in the context of colo power use, something APC executive Richard Sawyer talked about as a strong suit of that company. Companies with big server farms have started to notice those electric bills:

Energy efficiency in the data center has come up a lot recently. Has IT evolved to the point where it can consider energy efficiency without sacrificing uptime or performance?

Sawyer: Yes. A lot of the new equipment is getting more and more efficient. The Delta conversion products we use for our large scale [uninterruptible power supply] systems are extremely efficient. They're 95% efficient down to very low load levels. Even at a 25% load level, we're running about 94% efficient, as opposed to the old legacy style systems that were 60%-70% efficient.

With the cost of electricity increasing like it is -- a kilowatt hour going from $0.08 up to $0.13 per kilowatt hour in the Northeast-- it becomes a major factor. For a one megawatt load (1,000 kilowatts), to supply that system with electricity costs close to $1 million per year. That's a million dollars you can't spend on IT equipment. Even an efficiency difference of 10% works out to $100,000 per year. That buys a lot of IT applications or head count in your division. It's becoming a larger factor in the total cost of ownership. Obviously, the more efficiency you can put in, your ongoing expenses become more manageable.

With the price of electricity in California around $0.14/kWh, the dollars saved are even higher. And then there's the matter of the servers themselves. Colo-based server farms tend to have similar issues as power generation: capacity is sized, not by average load, but by peak response load. That means when there isn't a lot of load on the servers, they're still chewing the juice, wasting dollars. And even most servers aren't really that efficient just on a CPU-cycle basis. As one poster on the Slashdot thread noted, most servers spend very little time outside their idle loops (less than 2% on the machine he was using, but based on my own experience, 5% is pretty much the maximum you can expect).

Another factor here is that colos look at electricity as part of the package of providing services; there's no meter on the outside of a customer's cage or rack. I can only imagine this is likely to change given the ever-increasing costs of power. Servers now are optimized for performance; what would be useful is for the colo industry (already beset with thin margins as it is) to force customers to buy their own electricity, or bill them for it discretely, and better power management built into the servers along with traffic routing, such that machines could be kept in a low-power idle state when not needed.

GE's Wind Unit Books $2 Billion In Orders

According to Marketwatch, GE's wind energy unit has booked over $2 billion in orders for 2005, representing 2.4 GW of generating capacity. I wrote briefly about them previously.

Of Wine And Energy

Leave it to that crazy vino-obsessed pair at Knowledge Problem to turn a Supreme Court decision about interstate wine sales into a dialogue about barriers to entry in energy markets. (For my next act, I stand Lynne's hed on its head, and announce their latest triumph as a critique of pure Kiesling.)

USGS: More Oil In ANWR Than Previously Thought

Just in the nick of time (yes, that is sarcasm you detect), the USGS announces an increase in the amount of estimated oil and gas available in ANWR:

The assessment estimates that there are 4.0 billion barrels of oil (BBO), 37.5 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of natural gas, and 478 million barrels of natural gas liquids that are undiscovered and technically recoverable. Technically recoverable resources are the amount of petroleum that may be recovered using current technology.

Thanks to ANWR News for the link.

Hockey Stick. Firestorm. Natch.

MIT's Technology Review has yet another round of the ongoing McKittrick & Macintyre vs. everybody else wars, in which

Caspar Ammann, a paleoclimatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Eugene Wahl of Alfred University have analyzed the Mann-Bradley-Hughes (MBH) climate field reconstruction and reproduced the MBH results using their own computer code.

Mann famously refused to publish his own code; you can find the Ammann and Wahl code at the link above. I'm sure we'll hear more from M&M shortly.

Update 5/13: Yup, there's more on the way. "So far I don’t see anything in W-A that affects any of our results."

Duke's Rent-Seeking Love Of Carbon Taxes

NEI Nuclear Notes runs a story today indicating Duke Energy wants to expand its existing nuclear generating capacity at two power plants. Earlier this year, Duke applauded a possible carbon tax. In light of this expansion, the cynic observing the scene might be tempted to review Duke's fondness for the carbon tax as mere rent-seeking behavior, using the state to hobble its competitors.

Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey Inaugurate New Oil Pipeline

A new Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline will pump Azeri oil starting on May 25, according to civil.ge. The presidents of Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Turkey will all attend opening day ceremonies.

The BP-led and U.S.-backed BTC pipeline will carry Azeri oil to the Turkish port of Ceyhan, and eventually to western markets, via Georgia.

The pipeline will stretch 1,767 kilometers (443 km through Azerbaijan, 248 km through Georgia and 1,076 km through Turkey) and have a capacity of 800 thousand barrels of oil per day.

More on this from the BBC.

Update 5/25: Just noticed all the Metafilter folks coming in, so I have to admit I swiped the map from this Caspian Sea page at the US EIA. Unfortunately, they no longer are showing the map image for whatever reason.

OPEC Peaking 2005 Q4?

Via Odograph, dah dah dah, Algeria's oil minister says OPEC may not be able to meet fourth quarter demand. In a different Reuters report, OPEC president Kuwaiti oil minister Sheikh Ahmad al-Fahd al-Sabah said only Saudi Arabia has any spare capacity (1.5 Mbpd), and everyone else is pumping full tilt. This has pushed crude stocks to 327 million barrels in the U.S., their highest level in six years. "Supply growth in other parts of the world have fallen below expectations in part because a surge in Russian output has tailed off."

CSIS Report On Saudi Capacity

As a rejoinder to the Matt Simmons report on Saudi oil production peaking, Crossroads Arabia provides a detailed report (PDF) by Anthony H. Cordesman, Nawaf Obaid, and Khalid Al-Rodhan of the CSIS Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy Program. I've read about half of it; Simmons fans won't find much in it to change their minds. Some excerpts:

• pp. 7-8: regarding the credibility of Saudi reserves claims:

  [Simmons pulls] together a chain of negative indicators and possibilities that deserve serious consideration. However, much of their validity depends on the Saudi managers Aramco being wrong or covering up massive risks and development problems, and virtually all of the other analysts examining world oil reserves and production potential being wrong about both the size of the world's oil reserves and the ability of modern technology to provide future significant gains in ultimate recovery. His analysis also does not fully explore the extent to which technology gain can increase production (an area of considerable uncertainly) or the extent sustained high prices would lead to more efficient exploration, production and recovery.

  Of course, Simmons would likely point out that the rest of the world is dependent on those same Saudi managers to get those numbers in the first place.
• p. 11: "The world oil market is losing 1 million bpd from depletion every year." At least they admit that much (but of course, that's only happening to those other countries).
• p. 24: an explanation for what Simmons claims is his "smoking gun":

  The first energy crisis of 1973-74, triggered by the 1973 Arab Israeli War, led to a rapid increase in oil prices, which previously had been remarkably stable at $1.80-2.00 per barrel. However, demand for Saudi crude continued to rise in the aftermath of the crisis and company produced more than 9 million bpd in 1977 and hit a peak of 9.6 million bpd in 1981. At a 1976 Board meeting, a capital budget to increase capacity to 13.4 million bpd was approved, with plans on the drawing board for a capacity expansion to 20 million bpd by 1983.

  However, the impact of rapidly rising prices began to reduce global consumption of crude and stimulate non-OPEC production. In an ill-fated move, OPEC first adopted quotas in 1982 in an effort to maintain crude price levels. As a consequence, demand for Saudi oil dipped below 3 million bpd in 1985, before the Kingdom finally launched a price war to regain market share. The Kingdom did slowly claw back market share to the point that it was producing nearly 6 million bpd in 1990, before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and effectively ceded Iraq's market share to Saudi Arabia, the one producer quickly able to fill the supply gap.

  Given this history, it is not surprising that critics like Matthew Simmons should have uncovered warnings from Aramco's oil engineers made to Senate investigators in 1979 that Saudi reserves could not sustain planned production levels. At that time, as the concessionaire holding rights to produce unlimited quantities of Saudi crude until the scheduled end of the concession agreement in 1999, the American shareholders were faced with mixed fiduciary obligations to their shareholders themselves, to the Saudi government, and a broader stewardship duty to the world at large. But there is no particular evidence that were examining 50-year scenarios for what would be best for the Kingdom or for a global transition to alternate fuels. In fact, there was jockeying among the shareholders for the most advantageous position.

• p. 33: Regarding reserves transparancy:

  Saudi Arabia is very unlikely to provide perfect transparency about its future production plans and capacity...

  ... much of the assessment of future Saudi production capacity -- as is the case with the plans in many other nations -- depends largely on Saudi credibility, and particularly the credibility of Saudi Aramco.

  That credibility has so far been high.

There's a tremendous amount of material here, and as I said, I haven't really digested even half of it yet. One additional impression I get is that the Saudis really aren't exerting much effort on new field exploration, and in any case, new reserves are likely to be "substantially smaller than current proven accumulations" (p. 18).

Thanks to reader Hatcher for pointing me at this.

Getting Real World Mileage Data From Hybrids

Via Slashdot, a database that compares actual mileage numbers of various vehicles as reported by their owners. According to the Slashdot writeup,

The hot-selling Toyota Prius averages 48 miles per gallon among over 150 cars from across the country, with most drivers achieving between 45 and 51. The V-6 Honda Accord Hybrid delivers 30 miles per gallon while Ford's Escape Hybrid SUV averages 28. All hybrid owners are encouraged to post their data for these and other cars on the Internet's largest hybrid mileage database.

Unfortunately, the site is currently unavailable due to the Slashdot effect. The link above can be seen at Mirrordot.

Monkeysigns Of Life At Nanosolar

After facing legitimate skepticism both here and at Monkeysign, it appears Nanosolar now claims to be ready for prime time, according to Monkeysign. An article in the San Jose Mercury-News mentions heavy-hitting new hires (via the company's press release):

• Chris Eberspacher, Vice President of Engineering; formerly head of R&D at Shell Solar.
• Werner Dumanski, Executive Vice President of Operations; formerly head of manufacturing for Hitachi/IBM's $4.5 billion storage components division.
• Siva Sivaram, to the Board of Directors; Sivaram currently works for Intel as General Manager of "Intel’s billion-dollar IC Procurement and Enabling Division".

Monkeysign also notes Nanosolar has 42 patents, more than he earlier researched. Nonetheless, we're still told that products are coming Real Soon Now, with an outer bound of This Year. It doesn't help matters much, though; skepticism is called for until we can get something in our hands.

Remembering May Day

 One recurring theme here is that, no matter how well intentioned, government programs designed to steer actions one way or another are not only almost certainly predestined for failure, but dangerous as well. That is, markets constitute a powerful and benevolent force for the general welfare of mankind, and force, the opposite

With the subject of peak oil production comes a number of Green utopians attempting to force their solutions on society. For instance, the anonymous author of the UNplanning Journal has called for mass migrations in which the state forcibly relocates the "excess urban population" (who might that be?) to the fields and rural areas. That this was accomplished by such a scourge of mankind as Pol Pot should tell you all you need to know about its author; that he can make these kinds of claims with a straight face and yet claim to have the public's best interests at heart reveals either duplicity, or a romantic naiveté.

"But wait!" some of the Greens might say. "We're only doing this for their own good. After all, they're surplus, and certain to die if they stay where they are.

Upon such thoughts were the worst tyrannies of the 20th century founded. Utopian idealism, not greed or the need to impress chicks, was the cornerstone of Marxism and all it brutally imposed upon the people it afflicted. The derisive epithet "watermelon" (green on the outside, red on the inside) bears close semblance to the plans daily hatched for ending American dependence on fossil fuels. All of them stem from an itch to centralized power, but all of them fail to recognize that is precisely the problem. Too many a peak oil aficionado observes with tremors the grisly scene in North Korea while conveniently failing to note that North Korea also has the kind of power structure so many of them want to set up: i.e., aficionado on top.

It is with this thought in mind that I commend to you a wonderful series Catallarchy has compiled, a spectacular series of posts by guest writers as a remembrance of communism's malign presence. Whether attempting to count the slain, deconstructing Che Guevara's romantic image against his actual brutality, enumerating the methods of torture used in the Soviet gulags, or providing a history of cannibalism under Mao, Stalin, and in modern-day North Korea (cannibalism in 1930's Ukraine was "so widespread that the government printed posters that said: 'Eating your children is an act of barbarism.'”), these essays should give pause to anyone with an itch to start sentences beginning with the words, "We should...". To those still finding the words "yes, but" stuck in their gullets, I remand them to Scott Schule's words from "Away From Thebes" [note: since rescinded]:

The first day of my sophomore year history class the professor announced that we’d be reading The Communist Manifesto, and then he offered: “Stalin is not what Marx intended at all! That murderous tyrant has nothing to do with Communism!” Marx is innocent! And I, young and liberal and curious about Communist ideology, neither vomited nor screamed

But the answer was clearly shrill and tear-choked: “So what? Marx’ intentions are of no comfort —- none at all -— to the victims of how many pogroms? How many gulags? How many disappearances and silences and starvations and complete sufferings? Damn his intentions, and damn yours! Look at the results, and then gouge out your eyes at what you’ve seen!”

Update 2015-01-19: Links updated, where I can find them, on the new Catallarchy archive; the blog collective seems to have scattered.

A Bunch On Cars

This has been a busy week for news from the automakers. The biggest and baddest of this was obviously the downgrading of Ford and GM's corporate bonds to junk status. Autoguy tells why he thinks Ford's downgrade is based on transient problems, but GM's is deserved; mainly, that Ford has new, non-SUV options it's got near ready for sale.

The market has taken to caning recalcitrant automakers lately. GM's problems are a long time coming, something the Detroit Free Press make clear in a special three part report on the beleaguered company. Business as usual isn't going to work this time; the company can't get much smaller, it's got too many brands and no focus for any of them, and GM's UAW deal on healthcare erodes its margins. Of the three, healthcare gets the most press, but

"It's a smokescreen," said Sean McAlinden, vice president for research and chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research in Ann Arbor. "A lot of what they say is right. That's what makes this a very good smokescreen. ... Health care is a huge problem, but it's not the one that is going to destroy GM."

The real problem, McAlinden said, is that General Motors is using what it calls the "health care cost crisis" to disguise the fact that GM management hasn't designed enough cars people are excited about.

So when Kirk Kirkorian, who with Lee Iacocca once owned a large part of Chrysler before that company merged with Daimler, came around and bought 4% of GM with promises to buy another 5%, speculation ran rampant that Kirkorian might be the stick needed to whip the UAW into line.

GM's financial and product problems are compounded by its heavy bet on hydrogen as the technology of the future. Claiming a new generation of cars will be available by 2010, that may be far too late for the company, which has enormous structural problems to deal with and is tremendously dependent on a few models of SUVs for the bulk of its profits. But as with the other problems GM faces, it's just another case of management reading and believing its own press releases:

"GM's confidence is simply irrational," says Joseph Romm, a former Department of Energy official in the Clinton Administration and author of the book The Hype About Hydrogen. "Nobody in their right mind believes that hydrogen fuel cells could add to the bottom line in the next two decades. It would require like seven miracles, many outside the hands of GM."

Businessweek has come out, guns-a-blazing, with this prophecy:

BusinessWeek's analysis is that within five years GM must become a much smaller company, with fewer brands, fewer models, and reduced legacy costs. It's undeniable that getting to that point will require a drastically different course from the one Wagoner has laid out so far. He is going to have to force a radical restructuring on his workers and the rest of the entrenched GM system, or have it forced on him by outsiders or a bankruptcy court. The only question is whether that reckoning comes in the next year, if models developed by Vice-Chairman Robert A. Lutz fall flat; in 2007, when the union contract comes up for negotiation; or perhaps in five years, when GM may have burned through its substantial cash cushion.

Given oil prices, GM has little choice but to radically change their product line, but when Bob Lutz issues 1984-style denials of his earlier comments about axing a brand, when the company petulantly pulls its Los Angeles Times advertising after that paper's new auto columnist calls for Wagoner's head -- well, the impression is of a company in deep, deep denial. Lo: witness the shameless evasion of actual sales statistics by VP Mark LaNeve on the GM Fastlane Blog. Stubbornly ignoring reality has been a way of life at GM for over a quarter of a century, but it's not something that can continue unchecked; the real possibility of bankruptcy guards the exits.

Turning Paper Mill Waste Products Into Ethanol

Thanks to another blogger who threw me a sidebar link, Bouphonia, for this Christian Science Monitor story about International Paper converting xylan, a naturally-occurring sugar in trees, into ethanol. Normal paper processing wastes xylan as a byproduct. SUNY researchers think they can have a commercially viable process within two years.

The Other Kind Of Optimist

A few days ago, Lynne Kiesling passed along a Disinterested Party piece on why oil prices were about to go down, placing Stephen Ayer squarely in the minority of analysts who believe this will be the case so far. Even Thursday, as oil prices dipped below $50/bbl, speculators kicked in the afterburners on oil prices, based on long-term supply worries. Translated, depletion haunts the traders, whose future depends on translating those calls and puts into crude oil.

For myself -- and this blog -- I accept the consequences of peak oil production, that is, the cheap stuff's just about out. We might be able, with advanced recovery methods, to get more out of the ground in places we've already drilled. Likewise, some new fields exist that remain yet undeveloped, possibly even in the United States and Canada, but mostly in places that are either technically difficult (such as deepwater offshore in the Gulf of Mexico or off the coast of Africa), or are in countries with iffy political/legal stability, such as Russia, Nigeria, and Venezuela. Unconventional oil sources, such as oil sands, oil shale, ultraheavy crude (e.g. from the Venezuelan tar belt), fuel synthesis from other sources (Fischer-Tropsch processes derived from gasified coal or natural gas feedstocks) may offset some of this, but how much is still an open question. However, there are some who do not accept these as legitimate constraints, and have recently come out and said so.

One of the most astonishing of these is, of course, the new book from Peter Huber and Mark Mills, The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy. As the review post on Marginal Revolution concludes,

The authors do not quite connect their premises to their conclusions, but it makes for interesting reading. I took away the lesson that our energy consumption will rise indefinitely (and why), at least until our civilization falls.

It is this latter I am chiefly concerned about; twenty years or so of relatively cheap oil has befogged the thinking of some on this subject. With that in mind, I forward an article appearing in Canada's National Post (hat tip: peakoil.com) by Peter Foster. The concept of peak oil as a force to dismember industrial civilization, he declares, is a humbug foisted upon us by economic illiterates:

We are allegedly on the point of reaching the highest possible level of global output, whereupon economics will cease to function and our societies will be in danger of collapsing like the stone head cultists of Easter Island.

That oil production will peak some day appears obvious. That we are there, or almost there, is highly unlikely. The U.S. Geological Survey and the IEA put the likely peak production points between 15 and 25 years away, but whatever the precise date, markets will provide signals for the development of alternatives in good time. Indeed, they are already doing so.

The comment about Easter Island directly refers to Jared Diamond's recent book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. While I haven't read his book yet, the urge to dismiss Collapse as so much academic wanking is strong. Anyone who can conclude that agriculture amounts to "the worst mistake in the history of the human race" deserves a double dose of skepticism at least, and perhaps a boot to his gluteus maximus into a slow boat to one of the primitivist idylls philosphers of his ilk seem so unnaturally (not to mention hypocritically) fond of.

But I digress. I certainly agree with Foster on the flexibility of markets; indeed, it's the only thing that's likely to save the world. But ugly shocks along the way are a near-certainty. If world oil production were to peak within the next few years -- a very likely possibility, considering the scenarios clandestinely leaking from Saudi Arabia -- the world would certainly adjust, although the economic consequences would depend heavily on how fast production declined. Markets can do a lot of things; heedless brutality is one of their great features. That brutality now works its magic against notorious SUV-dependents General Motors and Ford, both of whom had their corporate bonds dropped to junk status, something Foster alluded to when he wrote

But hang on, isn't Detroit in "crisis?" Doesn't that mean the market is telling it something? (And it surely isn't telling it to build more ecologically fashionable, deathtrap Smart wristwatch/cars, which are costing Daimler Chrysler a bundle.)

He might sneer, but the breathtaking sales successes of Japanese marques with heavy investment in hybrid technology stand in appalling contrast to Detroit's failure to comprehend the changed market; the near-collapse of SUV sales doesn't seem to have registered. As recently as April 19, GM CEO Rick Wagoner actually went on record projecting oil steady at $40-$50 a barrel -- a range it hasn't actually been in all year. Ecologically fashionable the Prius and its sister cars might be, but selling they are.

But here, I pick at nits; his big moment is to come. Foster unholsters his big gun and aims it at the environmentalists.

The first priority for U.S. energy policy-makers, notes the WSJ, should be to remove the anti-energy fifth columnists. The Sierra Club is similarly a threat to natural gas development in Canada, most particularly in its role as aboriginal puppet master in holding up the Mackenzie Valley pipeline, which was recently put on ice by its frustrated promoters.

The peak and decline we should most eagerly seek is that of the power of anti-energy, anti-development, anti-human radicals. When it comes to the global arena, the best defence against disruption is surely to unleash human ingenuity via free markets while promoting policies of stout defence against mad mullahs, and democratization for the regimes of nouveau czars, disco sheiks and Bolivarian dingbats.

Given the virulent commentary I've received on this site previously, the temptation is to simply spit on my hands, agree and walk off. Certainly, human ingenuity will help in the coming crisis, and may -- I am tempted to say should, but things are tenuous -- prevent civilization from falling into total collapse. Therefore do we agree broadly on this point. But the magnitude of the prevarications from everyone involved -- governments and oil companies alike -- make an adequate assessment of the problem's scope difficult. Certainly, once world oil production passes its peak, the downside's slope won't be known save by the straining oil pumps themselves. Besides, once the lights go out, it won't take the Sierra Club's membership long to come a-roaring after the Mackenzie Pipeline, and even demand to assist in its construction.

No, the problem ultimately is not the Greens on that score; the problem is the madness of crowds still gripped by the belief that high oil prices result from some conspiracy of the sheikhs, or because of speculators. So long as the majority believes cheap oil extends just beyond that majority's expiration date, so long will the proper responses to this exigency be delayed.

Finally, Foster apparently sees no irony in his conclusion: why should we have to gird ourselves against the czars, sheikhs, and dingbats? Aside from the occaisional nutty outburst from, say, a Hugo Chavez or a Saudi Supreme Court justice, the chances of these countries seriously harming the U.S. by military action is slim. Wanting to keep his ideological powder dry, Foster leaves himself an escape clause in case the free markets, free minds trick doesn't do it: civilize the brutes, starting with the brutes in oil-producing countries. But governments committed to a retro, Kipling-esque foreign policy, especially one motivated by securing energy supplies, make it increasingly likely that, no matter how much we'd prefer a peaceable settlement, events will conspire against it. It assures the country of more and broader wars, ill-will, and increases of the state's warmaking machinery at the expense of peaceable pursuits, all of which will hobble the ability of the markets to function. Even if such a foreign policy succeeds, it will put the country on a treadmill of continued dependence on fossil fuels. That dependence will only serve to delay the transition to whatever energy sources come along next.

Flip, Flop, Flip: Japan & EU Reach ITER Accord

... according to the Yomiuri Shimbun (PDF, thanks to The FIRE Place for the link). Lots of concessions by the EU, but none of it a surprise; the "losing party" (i.e., Japan) will

• receive a 57 billion yen order for work on the main reactor
• supply 20% of the workers for the facility
• get additional related facilities, such as the (crucial) materials research facility
• pay only 10% of the costs, with France picking up 50%. China, Russia, South Korea and the US will split the remaining 40%.

New German Report Claims Plenty Of Available Wind Energy

A new report appearing in the IEEE Spectrum online edition says the German government has recently issued a report claiming there's plenty of wind power available:

In a 514-page study released this February, [the Deutsche Energie Agentur, or DENA] concludes that by 2015—when Germany hopes to have shut down 7300 megawatts' worth of nuclear power—the country can more than double its wind capacity to 36 000 MW, from 16 600 MW in 2004. The study was sponsored by a consortium of German grid operators, transmission companies such as E.ON AG (in Düsseldorf), and wind power interests.

Germany's total grid capacity is close to 120 000 MW, and wind currently supplies 6-7 percent of the country's electricity. (Though wind accounts for about 14 percent of capacity it supplies a smaller proportion of total electricity because of its intermittency.)

...

One surprise finding is that no additional thermal power plants would be required to ensure sufficient supply when winds are low. In fact, the plan predicts that doubling the capacity of Germany's wind sector actually reduces the overall need for reserve power on the grid by 2000 MW. The reason is that the wind turbines will be broadly distributed and therefore can be expected to continually generate at least 2000 MW of "statistically guaranteed power."

But there's always a fly in the ointment:

German opposition parties point out that, according to the DENA study, cutting CO₂ emissions by using wind power will cost more than €40 per ton of carbon, making it less cost-efficient than many energy conservation options. Germany's utility association agrees: "The DENA study shows that the programs for the promotion of renewable energies need to be revised," says Eberhard Meller, general executive manager of the German Electricity Association, in Berlin.

One wonders if this would still be true after GE gets their 7 MW turbines online.

Breaking Down Ores With Microwaves

I don't necessarily mean to turn this into a general tech blog, but sometimes it happens that way. Dr. Sam Kingman at the University of Nottingham has announced that his method of using microwaves to fracture ore rocks is ready for prime time, according to the Engineer Online. Conventional ore extraction is terribly inefficient, using most of its energy to make noise. Kingman uses microwaves to bombard ores with high energies for very brief durations, inducing thermal stresses that cause the rocks to shatter. This process uses about 1/20th the energy expenditure of conventional breaking machines.

Kingman said the technology would have important environmental implications. ‘Annual world electrical energy consumption is around 14,000 million kWh. Each kWh of energy generated from fossil fuel releases about 1.5kg of CO2 into the atmosphere. If we can save even one per cent of the world’s energy usage, then that’s a lot of CO2.’

But the mining industry is not famed for its environmental credentials, and while it is under pressure to become more sustainable, a far bigger incentive is the need to process more ore more quickly. So a potentially more attractive advantage to the industry is the fact that using microwave comminution valuable mineral particles break away at a coarser size and are therefore easier to recover. ‘When you do an economic analysis, the benefit of getting more metal out of the ground is what’s really attractive to mining firms,’ said Kingman.

Since it's estimated mining operations absorb 5% of the world's electrical generation, that could add up to a lot of savings. Ah, greed. Greed can be good.